More New Stuff

Several new sets have been announced recently:

- The last time I did a "new cards post" I mentioned that Sports Graphic Number was releasing a set in September featuring Hiroki Kuroda and Takahiro Arai of the Carp to celebrate the two of them reaching the Meikyukai this season (actually I left out that part).  BBM apparently has decided to rush a similarly themed box set out next week to preempt the Sports Graphic Number set.  BBM's box set will be called "200 Wins & 2000 Hits" and will also feature Kuroda and Arai.  Each box will contain 25 cards - 23 cards in the base set, an insert card (one of seven possible foil signed cards) and a "special" insert card (one of 11 possible memorabilia cards or one of three possible "super metallic" cards or one of an unspecified number of autograph cards).

- BBM's annual premium set will be released in late September.  For the fifth year in a row the set is called Genesis (I make the distinction simply because the set was previously known as Diamond Heroes from 1996 to 2001 and Touch The Game from 2002 to 2011).  The base set contains 120 cards - 108 player cards (9 from each team) and 12 team checklists - and there will be three 12 card insert sets - ELITE OF NINE, STADIUM JEWEL and CROSS FREEZE - but honestly no one really cares all the much about the base set or the insert sets - Genesis is all about the chase cards.  As always there is a bewildering amount of what BBM refers to as "Premium insert cards" - memorabilia cards including "big patch", "super patch", and "bat grip end" plus cards with more than one piece of memorabilia on them and a wide variety of autograph cards including autographed memorabilia cards (at least autographed balls) and multi-player autographs.  There is also some sort of booklet card available.  There's also the usual crazy parallel versions of the base sets.  I think the insert cards are all serially numbered to 50 but I don't know for sure.

- The checklist for Calbee's Series Three appeared on line recently.  Like the two previous Series this year there will be 72 player cards in the set (six per team).  There's also a 12 card "Exciting Scene" subset and the usual four card Checklist subset meaning that the base set will be 88 cards again (like it was for Series Two).  As always there is also a 24 card "Star" premium subset/insert set.  I haven't seen a release date for the set yet but it usually comes out in mid to late September.

- The Dragons are celebrating their 80th Anniversary this season.  BBM snuck out a kind of lousy Anniversary set last winter and now Epoch has decided to try their hand at one.  The set is called something like "Chunichi Dragons 80th Anniversary Record Breakers" and will be out in late August or early September.  I'm a little confused on the details but I think it's sold by the box (and a box has an MSRP of 11,200 yen or roughly $112).  Each box contains two mini-boxes and each mini-box has 11 cards.  I think there's a guarantee of two autographs in each box (which would probably be one in each mini-box) which I think means that the other 10 cards in the mini-box would be base set cards.  There are 49 cards in the base set which includes Dragons manager (at the time the set went to press anyway) Motonobu Tanishige and both active and OB Dragons players.  There's a number of different autograph cards available including autographed parallels of the base set cards and "booklet" cards featuring multiple player autographs on baseballs.